There is balance in life, but not fairness.

It's nervous work. The state you need to write in is the state that others are paying large sums of money to get rid of.

Poetry has been the longest pleasure of my life.

The tragedy is not that love doesn't last. The tragedy is the love that lasts.

Americans' great and secret fear is that America may turn out to be a phenomenon rather than a civilization.

It is the impulse of our century, with its nearly religious belief in magnitude, to fling an institution into every void.

I think that one is constantly startled by the things that appear before you on the page when you're writing.

Sometimes, surely, truth is closer to imagination or to intelligence, to love than to fact? To be accurate is not to be right.

In thoughts one keeps a reserve of hope, in spite of everything. You cannot say good-bye in imagination. That is something you can only do in actuality.

Human beings need unhappiness at least as much as they need happiness.

Great literature is like moral leadership; everyone deplores the lack of it, but there is a tendency to prefer it from the safely dead.

I live a very secluded life, a very contemplative life and a very meditative one. That is my ideal life.

Beauty is revealed when we learn to see with our hearts. The more educated our hearts the greater beauty we can see. Therefore, beauty is revealed with age.

The wise man belongs to all countries, for the home of a great soul is the whole world.

Pain is essential. Often I cannot avoid it.Therefore all one can do is redeem it; and the only way to redeem it is through literature, art, poetry, music.

Fashion makes fools of some, sinners of others, and slaves of all.

That's life - to turn each other on, to feel good, to feel in love.

It was an important period for us, because even though we weren't a "punk band", and what became a model for a punk band, we were able to be dragged along by the spirit of that time.

I was raised in a Christian household and heard a lot of praise music, so that's what helps me get to an emotional place.

Something that has always puzzled me all my life is why, when I am in special need of help, the good deed is usually done by somebody on whom I have no claim.

Make not your thoughts your prisons.